In the Woods by Tana French Read Free Book Online

delay you for too long,” I said. “The dog at the cottage: does he bark when people come to the site?”
    Mark shrugged and went back to his cigarette. “Not at us, but he knows us. We feed him scraps and all. He might if someone went too near the cottage, specially at night, but probably not for someone up by the wall. Off his territory.”
    “What about cars—does he bark at them?”
    “Did he bark at yours? He’s a sheepdog, not a guard dog.” He sent out a narrow ribbon of smoke between his teeth.
    So the killer could have come to the site from any direction: by road, from the estate, even along the river if he liked making things difficult. “That’s all I need for now,” I said. “Thanks for your time. If you’ll wait with the others, we’ll come and update you in just a few minutes.”
    “Don’t walk on anything that looks like archaeology,” Mark said, and loped off back to the Portakabins. I headed up the slope towards the body. The Bronze Age ceremonial stone was a flat, massive block, maybe seven feet long by three wide by three high, chipped from a single boulder. The field around it had been crudely bulldozed away—not too long ago, judging by the way the ground gave under my shoes—but a cushion around the stone had been left untouched, so that it rode high like an island amid the churned earth. On top of it, something flashed blue and white between the nettles and long grass.
    It wasn’t Jamie. I had more or less known this already—if there had been a chance it might be, Cassie would have come to tell me—but it still blew my mind empty. This girl had long dark hair, one plait thrown across her face. That was all I noticed, at first, the dark hair. It didn’t even occur to me that Jamie’s body wouldn’t have been in this condition. I had missed Cooper: he was picking his way back towards the road, shaking his foot like a cat on every step. A tech was taking photos, another was dusting the table for prints; a handful of local uniforms were fidgeting and chatting with the morgue guys, over by their stretcher. The grass was scattered with triangular numbered markers. Cassie and Sophie Miller were crouching In the Woods 27
    beside the stone table, looking at something on the edge. I knew it was Sophie right away; that backboard-straight posture cuts through the anonymous coveralls. Sophie is my favorite crime-scene tech. She is slim and dark and demure, and on her the white shower cap looks like she should be bending over wounded soldiers’ beds with cannon fire in the background, murmuring something soothing and giving out sips of water from a canteen. In actual fact, she is quick and impatient and can put anyone from superintendents to prosecutors in their place with a few crisp words. I like incongruity.
    “Which way?” I called, at the tape. You don’t walk on a crime scene until the Bureau guys say you can.
    “Hi, Rob,” Sophie shouted, straightening up and pulling down her mask. “Hang on.”
    Cassie reached me first. “Only been dead a day or so,” she said quietly, before Sophie caught up. She looked a little pale around the mouth; kids do that to most of us.
    “Thanks, Cass,” I said. “Hi, Sophie.”
    “Hey, Rob. You two still owe me a drink.” We had promised to buy her cocktails if she got the lab to fast-track some blood analysis for us, a couple of months before. Since then we’d all been saying, “We have to meet up for that drink,” on a regular basis, and never getting around to it.
    “Come through for us on this one and we’ll buy you dinner as well,” I said. “What’ve we got?”
    “White female, ten to thirteen,” Cassie said. “No ID. There’s a key in her pocket, looks like a house key, but that’s it. Her head’s smashed in, but Cooper found petechial hemorrhaging and some possible ligature marks on her neck, too, so we’ll have to wait for the post for cause of death. She’s fully dressed, but it looks like she was probably raped.